Breaking Bad: "Gray Matter"Review

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Walt and Pinkman both try to go legit, but end up cooking again.

By Seth Amitin

It sucks when you realize you get to a certain point in your life and realize there's no reversing what you've done.

Pinkman tried to turn legit. He got an interview thinking it was for a job as a realtor. He dressed up in a nice suit, stopped saying "yo," didn't act like such a fool. He seemed pretty bare, deconstructed, at his base, almost like he was trying to rebuild his life from the foundation. Unfortunately, he finds out the job is for a sign-flipping guy, a job that one of his former meth-addicted colleagues, Badger, already has.

It's not exactly looking in a mirror for Pinkman, but Badger is a representative of Pinkman's drug-running side. He can step above it, like walking out of the sea, but the riptide keeps pulling him back in. Badger asks for some meth and Pinkman decides that maybe he should start making it because, well, all his connections are in drug-running. That's what sucks. Pinkman realizes he made all his connections in drug-running and, essentially, there's no turning back. He's kind of stuck in this rut. And now he has Badger egging him on to create some new stuff and Pinkman figures, OK, why not, it beats wearing a costume and flipping a sign on the street corner.

It's an obvious choice. Pinkman seems to have learned a lot of Walt's process, making a pretty close copy of Walt's stuff, but not as clear (a foggy imperfection). Unfortunately, Badger is a moron and doesn't understand the process as well and gets pissed when Pinkman throws out a batch. They fight and Jesse pushes him out of the RV and drives off into the sunset, seemingly forced to start from square one again.

If you caught the episode, the moment that stuck out the most was the intervention scene. Skyler, convinced that Walt needs to see that everyone in the family cares for him so that he can get started on chemotherapy immediately, gets Hank and Marie and Walt Jr. to sit around Walt and express their distaste for Walt's inability to act. This comes just after Walt visited some old friends from his Nobel Prize days, most of whom are wildly successful in a company called "Gray Matters," which derived from his name, while he's barely making ends meet – and did you see that suit he was wearing? Must have been 15 years old. Walt's old buddy Elliot offered Walt a job and Walt turned it down. Elliot offered to pay for Walt's chemo and Walt turned it down. Walt has been sheepishly ignoring the gravitas of the matter and has been acting like an old dog, accepting his fate and refusing to get out of bed.

Walt later turns down an additional offer by Elliot's wife Gretchen, who brings up that something between her and Walt may have happened, but Walt flatly denies it and says that he's going to pay for it.

Walt's been unnecessarily stubborn about this whole thing. He's denied peoples' requests to help him, he's denied that he's even sick. He refuses to get treatment until Skyler hosts an intervention (more on that below), and even then, he doesn't want to. But it's Walt's stubbornness that gets him back into meth. Back where he knows he has connections. And in this way, Pinkman and Walt are still the same person.

When Skyler calls for the intervention, things get intense and real, almost like the writer of the scene lived through a similar moment and recorded it on tape. At first, each character provides a perspective. Hank doesn't really know what to say and starts throwing out similes that don't make sense. Skyler comes forward and tells Walt that she loves him and doesn't want him to do this and that he should welcome his baby daughter into the world. Walt Jr. tells his father that he's a "p*ssy," and Marie tells him to do what he wants, because its his decision. Marie was a nurse and knows that dying with dignity instead of living through invasive procedures on a hospital bed and being nauseated from treatment for six months before he eventually dies is hard on everyone. Then Hank agrees and everyone starts fighting.

Walt stops everything. He comes up with most moving speech you've ever heard. He says everyone in the room loves each other. Everyone wants what's best for each other. But, as he says, he needs a choice. A choice between living or dying. Because frankly, he doesn't get to choose much of anything these days. Budgetary restrictions, time restrictions, job restrictions – dying is the only thing he can control. And with the cancer spreading, what good is it for him to live two years of life that would limit his mobility and make him too sick to do anything (work, enjoy a meal, make love, etc.). He wants to live in his house and sleep in his bed – not the hospital's. He doesn't want to choke down 30-40 pills a day, lie around too tired to get up, lose his hair and "so nauseated, [he] can't move his head." He wants to be remembered for who he is, and not the dead man walking he will become.

All of these are important concerns. But the next morning, Walt (most likely) realizes it's more important, for Skyler's and Walt Jr.'s sake, to go out with a fight and at least try to survive than to die like this. He goes to get his first treatment. And since he's too proud to take Elliot's offer (or whatever subtext that will hopefully be explained later), he goes back to Pinkman later that day.